So, while I again failed at hitting 40 hours, I did break my previous record by 1 hour. Week 1 was 21 hours, week 2 was 31 hours, and now week 3 was 32 hours, so I am improving. I’m going to give it a 4th attempt, and will let you know how I do in a week.

Affiliate Marketing

After reading a bunch of stuff such as some old posts by Shoemoney and threads such as this one on WickedFire (I recommend you use that link as it weeds out all the trolls. Read it from the bottom up as it’s in reverse chronological mode), I decided to take the plunge into affiliate marketing.

Some of you may remember how I was going to try out PPC arbitrage a while back. While I did start that, I didn’t get far before putting it on hold to focus attention on my blog and new sites such as PublisherSpot and PublisherForums. Affiliate marketing, as I understand it, is not the same thing as PPC arbitrage. With PPC arbitrage you’re basically buying keywords and reselling them; buying through AdWords and selling through AdSense for a profit.

Affiliate marketing is different in that you’re buying (usually but not always) through PPC such as AdWords, and trying to convert sales or leads. As a result, sites between arbitrage and affiliate marketing tend to differ as well (again, from what I can tell; I’m a complete newbie to this).

PPC arbitrage sites are typically several pages with content catered to generating targeted AdSense ads. The content is usually shamefully poor and the goal is to usually trick users into clicking ads.

Affiliate marketing sites, are quite often one-page “landing pages” with extremely simple designs, designed to capture the person’s attention and then provide an easy way for them to continue on to the merchants account by clicking on clearly placed ads or forms.

Two things lured me to affiliate marketing from PPC arbitrage. For one, on PPC arbitrage sites, you need to do a bit of research to write the content on the site, and then ad placement and integration into the design. In contrast, with landing pages, you basically just need a flashy page with minimal text and really no content.

Secondly, and this can definitely be debated, the big numbers appear to be in affiliate marketing. With PPC arbitrage you’re working purely on volume since you’re individual profits are so much smaller ($0.25-$5.00). While you’re still working on volume with affiliate marketing, you’re also dealing with larger numbers ($10.00-$300.00) and get rewarded from the merchants with the more volume you give them. That’s why it’s called performance based marketing. With PPC arbitrage you don’t get that added incentive.

ANYHOW, after playing around in CJ for a while, I chose 4 different niches. I decided to go against what I’d normally do, and chose four very high paying markets. Two of them are the cream of the crop, and the other two are pretty high but not as saturated (from my guesstimation). I decided to jump into the huge saturated pool with shrugged shoulders as I felt there still had be room in there.

I really don’t know what the hell I’m doing though. I’m just doing what I think affiliate marketing thing is all about, and going by the scraps and pieces I’ve read on forums and blogs here and there.

Today I bought 3 domains (I had another domain left over from before that I can use) and surprised myself again how insane it is that there are so many good domains available out there. For $55 (I paid for 3 domains for 3 years) I picked up 3 domains that I think could resell for several hundred dollars quite easily. (Obviously I won’t be disclosing the domains here; competition for my PPC keywords…)

Then, I hired a guy to make me four landing pages for each site. He should be done in a day or two. He already finished the PSD of one of them and it looks pretty good. I’m starting to get excited now.

Once the sites are done all I need to do is add the ads to them (which I still have to learn how to do, heh) and then launch an AdWords campaign.

I’ll be launching campaigns for 7 sites, the four landing pages and I’m going to make little store/offer areas on Movie Vault and MMA Forums, and also launch a campaign for PublisherSpot.

This will get expensive FAST. I wish AdWords let you pay with PayPal as my MasterCard has a pretty low limit.

Anyhow, I’ll keep you guys posted. My first goal as a newbie affiliate marketer? To get my landing pages finished and up, start my campaigns, and make at least $0.01. It doesn’t have to profit, but just anything. I want to have the system actually up and running and working. Then I’ll set another goal from there. Maybe even make some money 😉

Lastly, I’ll be spending many of my next work sessions doing a lot of reading and rearch. I plan on going through all the CJU tutorials and lessons at Commission Junction as well as doing the AdWords Professional testing and training.

17 Responses to “My Plunge Into Affiliate Marketing”

It’s a constant battle against Google’s Quality Score. It’ll probably drive you nuts pretty soon as it did for me. Just don’t overbid on your keywords. The max bid I’d put is 30 cents per click; that is if the keywords are converting well.

It’s better to bid a little strong in the beginning, so you can get decent placement. Remember, part of the QS game is CTR, and you need decent placement to get a good CTR. You can always lower your bids later if you see that you’re aren’t breaking even.

People spend way too much time picking on you. I make very little off the web and wish I could make more but my commitment to web projects is incredibly small. Its quite sad and I’m glad you’re trying something new. Success or not at least you tried which is more than most people can say.

Whether you are clueless or not compared to the smart asses out there is not the point. What you are posting about your findings is interesting and of use to people like me who really are totally clueless, with no research under their belt whatsoever.

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